Chaja & Mimi

Chaja & Mimi (2013)

A film about friendship, homeland and identity.

Chaja Florentin and Mimi Frons have been best friends for 83 years. Born and raised in Berlin, they had to escape from the Nazis to Palestine with their families in 1934. They talk about their complicated relationship with Berlin in a Tel Aviv café where they meet everyday. A film about friendship, homeland and identity.

Date of release
2013-06-22
Runtime
10m
Genres
Documentary
Director
Eric Esser

Casting

Interesting facts

Chaja & Mimi is a 2009 documentary short film by producer/director Eric Esser from Berlin, Germany. The work consists primarily of an interview with two Israeli Jews, Chaja Florentin and Mimi Frons, about their ambivalent relationship to the city of their birth, Berlin. The first version of the film was completed and released in 2009 in Germany only; a second version of the film, fully revised for the international film market, was completed and released in 2013.

Background

The first version of Chaja & Mimi debuted on 6 February 2009 at the Directors Lounge film festival in Berlin, as an entry in the Memories category of the festival program. The film was reviewed by Sabrina Small for the Directors Lounge festival blog.

The fully revised international version of the film premiered on 22 June 2013 at the Walter Benjamin Short Film Competition in Portbou, Spain. The film festival was supported by the Goethe-Institut of Barcelona.

The interviews were conducted in the Café Mersand in Tel Aviv, Israel, the favorite café and regular haunt of the film's protagonists. This Café was founded in 1958 by a German emigrant to Israel, Walter Mersand; it was considered to be the main meeting place for Yekkes in Tel Aviv.

The Anne Frank Center in Berlin has incorporated the film into its educational/informational work since 2011, within the framework of its project, Nicht in die Schultüte gelegt (What they forgot to put in your schoolbag). The project's learning materials are designed for schoolchildren aged 10 and older. The project, like the film, Chaja & Mimi, encourages retrospection based upon the recollections of Jewish survivors of the Holocaust.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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